Comment by anonymous908213

Comment by anonymous908213 2 days ago

3 replies

Not at all. It's irrational to judge how legitimate something is by its ability to get a slice of a finite namespace. That heuristic may have been slightly useful 30 years ago, but since then internet usage has exploded and the desirable .coms have generally all been nabbed already.

4ndrewl 2 days ago

Doesn't that lead to the opposite conclusion? I'm much more likely to believe nike.com is genuine compared to nike.sportsgear

  • anonymous908213 2 days ago

    I would trust ".com" or ".sportsgear" equally, which is to say, I put zero trust into the domain name because it's not a useful heuristic. For 30+ year old businesses that had a better opportunity to secure their .com, maybe the heuristic could be helpful, but it could be actively harmful for anything newer which had its .com squatted. Will you give your credit card info to any .com on the basis of .com being trustworthy? Or would you rather consider using the abundant information available on the internet to more reliably identify the trustworthiness of a site?

    • 4ndrewl 2 days ago

      > Will you give your credit card info to any .com on the basis of .com being trustworthy

      Of course not, and that's why I didn't say that. I said I'm more _likely_ to trust nike.com, and would give more scrutiny to nike.randomtld.